On The Mark: Rural counties win in recruiting workers

Some years ago, I reported on the success of Carlton and Aitkin counties in attracting new residents. University of Minnesota researchers found that for the period 2000-2010, these two counties gained more people than they lost to death or outmigration. Both counties were among the highest net gainers through net in-migration.

Although many young people moved out of these counties after high school to find jobs elsewhere, substantial numbers of people aged 30 to 70 moved in, including families with school-aged children. Both counties also welcomed newcomers between the ages of 55 and 69, including people retiring to winterized cabins.

New research from the University of Minnesota and our state department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) credits a decade of concerted efforts to attract and retain new residents for a continuation of this pattern.

The University of Minnesota’s Extension Service deserves credit for much of this, helping counties recruit new residents. The Extension teams studied why people move to rural areas, disseminating the findings to local economic development staff across the state. According to DEED, “no other state has a network of resident recruitment initiatives like those in Minnesota.”

The U of M researchers document tightening labor markets in many rural areas of the state, especially as baby boomers retire. But, they also found a “brain gain” — a movement of people in their prime working years to rural communities. They discovered that these workers moved not just for jobs, but for lifestyle reasons such as living in a place that’s great for raising children, being closer to family or facing less traffic and congestion.

Economic development practice used to be preoccupied with recruiting firms and jobs, assuming that a workforce would materialize to staff them. Vintage strategies involved leveraging state and federal resources to improve critical infrastructure for industrial expansion. But “if you build it, they will come,” did not work well for many communities. Industrial recruitment wasn’t working if the local community could not ensure a workforce. Some 85 percent of cities in Minnesota have fewer than 5,000 residents.

Thus, attracting residents — especially those of working age — has recently emerged as economic development “best practice” for many smaller communities. Earlier research by our state’s demographer noted that in addition to retirees favoring a rural and outdoors-accessible lifestyle, a significant group of in-migrating families consisted of two working-age parents with school-age children. Demographers speculated that this could be a response to the large and often impersonal and academically competitive atmosphere of many big city schools. Schools in our area do a pretty good job of educating the whole person. Some are working on diversifying their student populations with exchange students and newcomers of Native American, African American and Latino heritage.

The university team concludes that as the competition for labor heats up across the nation, resident recruitment efforts and innovative practices will help smaller communities and rural regions of Minnesota — as well as the state as a whole — stand out as great places to work and live.

Columnist Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband, Rod Walli.